Global warning

Roland Emmerich's blockbuster about the ultimate effect of climate change delivers all the ingredients of a fine disaster movie. But could it, in parallel with Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, also help save mankind from George Bush?

Global warning

Roland Emmerich's blockbuster about the ultimate effect of climate change delivers all the ingredients of a fine disaster movie. But could it, in parallel with Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, also help save mankind from George Bush?

On my way to seeing Roland Emmerich's latest blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow, I found myself humming for the first time in 40 years a song from Blitz!, Lionel Bart's 1962 musical about plucky East Enders in the Second World War. The show was most celebrated for Sean Kenny's remarkable sets featuring destructive air raids, with St Paul's glowing as a beacon of hope in the background while blazing buildings collapsed all around. This was as near to a disaster movie as any play I've seen, but the song I recalled was an uplifting number, 'The Day After Tomorrow', that looked forward in an optimistic spirit to a free and prosperous post-war world.

The Day After Tomorrow has a lot in common with Blitz! in its predictability, sentimentality and depiction of a nation drawn together through a sense of shared peril. But the meaning of its title is the reverse of the wistful tenor of Bart's song. Here on the day after tomorrow most of mankind will be wiped from the earth.

The film's central character, the Washington-based climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), has a premonition of disaster in a cliff-hanging opening sequence. Jack finds himself clinging to a fissure that suddenly appears beside a research station in Antarctica. He's persuaded that global warming will bring on a new Ice Age within 500 to 1,000 years unless world leaders introduce immediate reforms. But he's pooh-poohed by an arrogant Vice-President, who places the national economy before unproven anxieties about the environment. Only the British scientist, Professor Rapson (Ian Holm), believes him.

But Hall was being optimistic. A series of freak storms convinces him this climactic transformation will be sudden, rather than gradual - possibly in days rather than weeks. He urges an evacuation to the south.

Emmerich's film is based on a book called The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber which, one supposes, is more sober than the screenplay Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff have wrought from it. But in the opening scenes they create a convincing, if obviously accelerated, scenario for global extinction that should be - to use a cliche - a wake-up call for humanity.

In the British disaster flick of the 1960s, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, coincidental H-bomb tests in the east and west throw the world off its axis and destroy our civilisation. Might the concurrent explosions of The Day After Tomorrow and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 throw Bush off balance and save mankind?

Anyway, having delivered his message, Emmerich has to entertain us with all the things we expect from group jeopardy and disaster films, something he has given us before in Independence Day and Godzilla. The first ingredient is spectacular destruction, which his battalion of special effects experts provide. There is a little problem in making such a film in the wake of 11 September 2001. As the camera pans over the Manhattan skyline, we are only too aware of the absence of the World Trade Centre. With footage of the demolition of the Twin Towers indelibly printed on our minds, can we pleasurably anticipate something similarly awful happening to New York for fun?

The answer lies in the fact that no one wrote about 9/11 without evoking disaster movies. Reality and cinema have become one in our media-saturated world. So the audience can gleefully watch a hurricane devastate Los Angeles and see a tidal wave turn Manhattan into a high-rise Venice with a Russian tanker floating down Fifth Avenue. This is followed by a big freeze that covers the city in ice, leaving the Statue of Liberty buried up to her waist.

This kind of cinematic devastation gives us the same kind of satisfaction we get from reading Shelley's 'Ozymandias of Egypt'. The fate of an obliterated Europe is passed over with little comment. We do, however, see Ian Holm and his two young associates having a final dram - their last toasts are 'To England', 'To mankind', 'To Manchester United'.

The second ingredient of the disaster movie is human interest. We need a small bunch of survivors to identify with, and here that role is assigned to the family of Professor Hall, whose workaholism has led to a separation from his wife and neglect of his teenage son (Jake Gyllenhaal). Naturally the crisis draws them together, and dad undertakes a perilous redemptive journey to rescue the lad, who's taken refuge in the New York Public Library. This provides suspense and humour. The survivors have to keep warm by burning books. But should they throw Nietszche into the fire?

A third ingredient is the moral dimension, the apportioning of blame, and this usually reflects the temper of the times. The 1936 movie San Francisco presented the immoral world of the city before the judgment of the 1906 earthquake and then its subsequent rebuilding. This was equated with the social corruption and financial recklessness that caused the Depression, and Roosevelt's New Deal that was bringing about national recovery. Often there are negligent or hubristic scientists on hand to blame, but in this film they are all good men.

Usually attendant priests are there to provide a religious message (Spencer Tracy in San Francisco, Gene Hackman in The Poseidon Adventure) but the references to prayer and God in The Day After Tomorrow are perfunctory. In this secular film the faults are laid firmly on the steps of the White House and the bureaucracy serving it.

The Vice-President is a complacent, weaselly figure with a passing likeness to Dick Cheney. The weak, inattentive President always defers to the V-P, but resembles the ecologically minded Gore more than Bush. He is far removed from the President of Emmerich's Independence Day, a courageous Gulf War veteran who would now remind us of John Kerry. The movie's best laughs and sharpest ironies arise from xenophobic citizens of the world's remaining superpower having to flee south to save their lives, flowing into Mexico as illegal immigrants.

A disaster movie must also offer hope for the future. The Towering Inferno ended with the suggestion that the ruined building be preserved as a monument to the 'bullshit' of capitalism. Here we are consoled by the claim that mankind survived one Ice Age so can get over another.